Wednesday, 5 August 2015

From the Personal to the Universal - Alasdair Gray's Visual Art

As we get ready to welcome Lanark onto our stage, we thought it was the ideal time to explore Alasdair Gray's visual art which is central to design of the production. We asked Sorcha Dallas for her insight into Gray's often overlooked artwork. Sorcha curated and devised the recent Alasdair Gray Season which saw Alasdair's work exhibited across Glasgow.

Alasdair
Gray is a prolific polymath, internationally acknowledged as a major Scottish
writer. Over the last 50 years he has built an extensive body of work within
both the literary and visual art fields. His written oeuvre is unique across
all genres - fiction, poetry, plays, critical essays and reviews: it is
renowned, but his visual work has been less widely acknowledged due to it never
being thoroughly researched, archived and promoted.

My working relationship with Alasdair Gray began in 2007, although I had
encountered his work long before. As a painting student at Glasgow School of
Art, Lanark was a key text and cited as a constant source of inspiration for
many an emerging artist. Studying in the late 90s in Glasgow I witnessed an
increase in experimental and 'environmental' art within the city, with many of
the artists using the city itself as the context to their work. The energy of
these artists was critical in establishing the artist run space TransmissionGallery in the late 80s, which was crucial in fostering a local community and
art scene. Transmission Gallery was the catalyst in creating a vibrant,
grassroots art scene which encouraged artists to stay within the city, to not
move (in the past many would have had to move to London for both economic and
career opportunities) but to build an international dialogue and root it firmly
back into a local community.

Transmission Gallery, King Street, Glasgow. Credit Stephen Robinson

Transmission has always encouraged cross
pollination of mediums, politics and ideas and Gray and a new generation of
writers (such as James Kelman and Liz Lochhead) were often involved in readings
and events, such as the 1987 series 'Transmission Goes Verbal'.

Artists who are
musicians (and vice versa) add to Glasgow's supportive, experimental and
vibrant scene, securing its position as a leading international city of
culture. Alasdair Gray's politics, ideas, publications and artworks continue to
inspire Scottish writers and artists seeking to achieve an international voice
whilst still being based in Scotland. His work has always been rooted in the
idea of the local. However, Gray has always striven to use this idea as a
starting point to acknowledge and discuss more universal themes, a sentiment
that inspired the Transmission generation and holds strong to this day.

When I started working with Alasdair I had been working with a younger
generation of Glasgow based artists through the commercial gallery (Sorcha
Dallas) I owned and ran. From 2003-2011 the gallery offered a support structure
for a new generation of emerging artists based within the city. It was only the
second contemporary commercial gallery in Glasgow and grew out of the artist
run scene in which I had been involved since the late 90s. Many of the artists
I worked with, like myself, admired Gray's unequivocal vision, often at odds
with current practices, and the way he used the familiar, Glasgow, to deal with
international ideas and concerns. Although Alasdair had trained at Glasgow
School of Art and considered himself an artist who fell into writing, it was
the latter for which he was best known.

Alasdair Gray mural at Hillhead Subway Station, Glasgow

Walking around the West End of Glasgow
you could experience Gray's murals, however go beyond that it seemed most
people encountered his visual work through his books. My main aim has been to
recontextualise Alasdair's visual work, to show it is as unique and autonomous
as his literary works and to make a wider public aware of the incredible body
of work spanning over 65 years. The key to this has been promoting it through
exhibitions and events (such as The Alasdair Gray Season I recently devised
whose main show 'From The Personal to the Universal' at Kelvingrove Art Galler and Museum I curated) as well as ordering his
visual material and creating an online resource through which to experience it
which I will developing further in 2015 and beyond, in partnership with Glasgow
University and Glasgow School of Art.

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Internationally reputed for its repertoire the Citizens Theatre presents a mixture of contemporary versions of classic plays and new Scottish drama. We work with writers, directors and companies that have a reputation for producing outstanding work to deliver truly inspirational live theatre.

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